The Case

The name of this site is a joke, and it is worth getting the joke straight before anything else. I do not know Bigfoot. I have not met one, camped near one, or been followed by one. I know about Bigfoot: the reports, the casts, the film, the studies, the hoaxes, the people, the money, the law, and the hundred and fifty years of argument. That is a different kind of knowing, and the gap between the two is the entire subject.

Here is the situation, stated as plainly as it can be stated.

Tens of thousands of people in North America have reported seeing a large bipedal animal that science does not recognize. Many of them are experienced outdoorsmen. Some are police officers, game wardens, biologists and soldiers. A great many of them gained nothing from saying so and lost something. There is a substantial physical record: plaster casts by the hundred, a famous strip of 16mm film, hair samples, audio recordings, one enormous body impression in a Washington mud wallow.

And there is no animal. No body, no skeleton, no piece of a skeleton, no fossil, no roadkill, no tissue that has ever come back from a laboratory as anything but bear, elk, cow, dog, horse, raccoon or human.

Both of those paragraphs are true at once. Most writing on this subject picks one and pretends the other is not there.

The two questions people keep merging

Does a large undescribed primate live in North America? This is a zoological question with a zoological answer, and the answer is arrived at the same way it is for every other animal: a specimen, a description, a type designation. On the evidence available, the honest position is that the case is very weak and getting weaker as camera coverage expands without producing anything.

Why are so many careful people certain they saw one? This is a completely different question. It is a question about perception, memory, testimony, community and story, and it has real answers that do not require anybody to be lying. It is also, to me, the more interesting question, because it is the one where the evidence is abundant rather than absent.

Confusing these two is what makes the literature so bad. Believers treat the second question's rich evidence as though it answered the first. Skeptics answer the first and then act as though they have explained the second, which they have not, and often behave insufferably while doing it.

What this site actually does

It puts the whole record in one place and labels every piece of it. Five labels, and they describe the standing of a claim, never the existence of an animal:

• DOCUMENTED The event or object demonstrably happened or exists. Jerry Crew's 1958

cast is documented. That is a fact about a cast.

• ALLEGED One named person's claim, uncorroborated. Albert Ostman's six days in a

sleeping bag is alleged, and always will be.

• CONTESTED Qualified people publicly disagree, with real published argument both

ways. The Patterson-Gimlin film is contested and it is honest to say so.

• DEBUNKED A specific sourced explanation has superseded it.
• HOAX Fabrication, admitted or demonstrated.

Nothing gets a chip because it feels right. Nothing gets published without a source that can be followed. Where the popular version of a story turns out to be wrong in the sources, the site says so, and that cuts in both directions: the skeptical canon has its own myths, and the most overstated claim in the entire field may be the confident assertion that Ray Wallace's wooden feet explain everything. They do not, and the people who repeat that are doing exactly what they accuse believers of doing.

The part where I am not neutral

Neutrality is not the same as fairness, and pretending to have no view is its own dishonesty. So: I think the probability that there is a breeding population of eight-foot bipedal apes in the Pacific Northwest is very low. The specimen problem is not a technicality. An animal of that size, in that number, in that country, in this century, would have turned up. It would have been hit by a truck.

I also think that almost everybody who reports one is telling the truth about their own experience, that a standing black bear at eighty yards in failing light is a genuinely ambiguous object, and that the contempt routinely aimed at witnesses is unearned and ugly. Being wrong about what you saw is the most ordinary thing in the world. It happens to pilots, to police, and to scientists, and there is a large research literature saying so.

Those two positions are compatible. Holding both at once is most of what this site is for.

What would change it

One specimen. A body, or a piece of one, with a taxonomic description and a holotype in a museum where anyone can go and look at it. That is the whole bar, and it is the same bar the saola cleared in 1992 and the kipunji cleared in 2005.

If that happens, every page here gets rewritten, and the correction goes on the front page rather than in a footnote. That is not a rhetorical flourish. It is the stated method, and it is the only promise this site makes.

Start wherever you like. The evidence is the shortest route to the actual state of play. The sightings are where the human weight of it is. And the Rogue's Gallery is where you find out that this field's roster runs from tenured anthropologists to men selling plaster feet out of a truck, sometimes at the same conference.